A recurring theme with readers responding to recent columns about BC Ferries is concern over lack of transparency in accounting for costs on supposedly money-losing runs and how overhead costs from bloated management might be distributed across individual ferry operations.

For example, one reader argues, the corporation has spent almost a decade fiddling with proposals to cut cost by replacing the current ferry between Denman Island and Bulkley Bay with a cable system, which would save the company the expense of about two deckhand positions. However, locals say it wouldn’t be suited to the waters of Baynes Sound.

Meanwhile, during the same period, the ferry corporation has shovelled more than $125 million into the money-losing Tsawwassen to Duke Point service.

So, what share of the Tsawwassen to Duke Point run’s capital costs are operating losses and what share of its management overhead are born by the Denman Island route and other small services?

Who knows? Those figures and any detailed rational for how costs are determined aren’t routinely broken out.

A number of readers wonder why the broader economic question of how transportation policy might affect the province’s prosperity as a whole have to be extracted from scores of uncoordinated government, non-government and private sector surveys, studies and reports by a lowly newspaper columnist.

Good question. Nobody, it seems, thinks these numbers are worth analyzing in any comprehensive way to determine the best strategic cost-benefit options for developing and funding transportation infrastructure that helps rather than hinders provincial growth.

In Alaska, for example, wrestling with similar problems, state policy is clear: Keep ferry fares low “to generate travel and socio-economic benefits derived from the movement of people and goods” even in the face of rising costs.

Why? Because the state’s own comprehensive cost-benefit analysis found that in 2007, despite spending $96 million to subsidize the system’s $140-million budget, the investment actually yielded $173 million in benefits from jobs, statewide spending and tax revenue.

Compare that to concerns being expressed by tourism operators on the central coast who say planned efficiencies, which include swapping out a larger ferry servicing Bella Coola for a smaller connector vessel that some complain will take 33 hours to complete the trip — this is with a small waiting room, a vending machine and a couple of toilets (what a tourist incentive!) — will force half of them to close doors.

Now, I’m no economist but this does beg the question raised by readers: Why is a private sector newspaper columnist left to examine these implications when government should be doing it as a precursor for sound policy planning? By what logic do we get back-of-the-envelope policy first and third-party analysis later?

We’re talking possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone provincial revenue at a time when government professes anxiety about balancing its budgets, and billions of dollars in degraded productivity and family prosperity at a time when government trumpets commitments to family well-being through a long-term jobs strategy.

Reader after reader — from the coast, the urban mainland and the Interior — asks variations on the same question in letters: What’s the plan? What’s the province’s long-term objective for marine transport in this vitally important sector of the economy? Is it just political tactics, appearing to cut costs on the ferry corporation’s books while damning the consequences on other sectors’ books — tourism, for example?

What’s the ferry corporation’s long-term strategy for recovering dwindling ridership as price resistance stiffens in the face of rising tariffs? What’s the long-term plan for tariffs themselves? Is there a ceiling, or is the plan to just let them rise indefinitely until we wind up with the absurd model of one last passenger paying a million dollars a trip?

At what point do rising tariffs meet such price resistance that the whole arrangement becomes unsustainable and, eventually, proves politically untenable, too?

What, readers ask, is the actual management overhead for the ferry corporation, not just overall but for each of these smaller ferry runs that are targeted as cost centres?

How much of the cost for a hugely expensive new headquarters building in Victoria, apparently required to house the corporation’s ballooning management unit, is now charged as overhead against the operating costs of small routes serviced by ferries without amenities where passengers are lucky to get a toilet and a candy dispenser.

Pardon me, readers ask, but who is charting the course here? And where, exactly, is this model of rising rates, diminishing service and dwindling passenger loads supposed to be taking us? Are the provincial economic doldrums really where we want to sail this listing ship of state?

Questions like these from ordinary citizens seem entirely reasonable. Shouldn’t we be having a detailed and energetic public discussion in the legislature about what the answers might entail for the social and economic culture of our province?

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Stephen Hume: Who is charting the course for BC Ferries?

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